Help Please

At school we have been working on a fabulous project. There is a daycare called Neighborhood House in Salt Lake that provides daycare for children and disabled adults for low income families. A number of years ago they acquired an acre and a half of land in-between their exisiting property and the Jordan River. It has been vacant, growing very good thistles for years, but it is now time for a change.

Our graduate workshop was asked to develop some plans to use this land. We were asked to try and make a spot for the community to enjoy while making the space work with Neighborhood House's existing program.

We talked with the staff, the kids, the adult clients, potential funders, and people from the community to figure out what should be on the site. In the end each student (all five of us) came up with our own design based on the input from our earlier meetings.

All of our designs are on this blog http://neighborhoodhousegardenproject.blogspot.com.

We need some help in figuring out the cost for some of our design elements, as well as general thoughts on the designs.

If you have a moment please look at the site and give us some feedback.

Thanks

I've been thinking about energy recently. The new administration has expressed a  desire to push forward with alternative energy and I think that it is a fabulous idea.

I have been wondering if certain areas could make alternative energy the basis of their economy, exporting it out to surrounding regions.

The area that I think about the most in this regard is Nevada (and parts of Wyoming). It seems to me that it would be the perfect place for large solar arrays, or wind farms. The place is desolate, with small farming towns, that really makes one wonder about the sanity of people who try and farm crops in the desert, or high plains. However the farming of energy, especially renewable energy would be ideal for boosting the local, and regional economy and providing for more secure and stable national energy environment.

The only problem I can see with this plan is transmission. I don't know the best way to get the energy from the middle of nowhere to the more energy consumptive cities.

My other energy thought comes from a show I saw on a German policy, where the legislature provided people with twice the amount of money for putting into the energy grid than it cost to withdraw from the grid. Basically there was no way that you could not make money if you installed a windmill or solar panels. The images shown were of thousands of houses with solar panels on them, solar panels on the side of the major roads, and out in the range land with cattle and sheep grazing beneath them.

I though this was a great idea. The government provided the proper incentive for people to make an initial, completely safe investment. Then when the bills term expires the country is blanketed with a renewable energy source and is less dependent on the more volatile international energy market. All that and it's good for the environment.

Apocalypse 2012

So I watched part of a show the other night about various prophecies that foretold the end of the world. Among the things discussed were the oracle at Delphi, the prophecies of Nostradamus, the I Ching, and the Mayan calendar.  Most of the show was dumb, (by which I mean overly speculative and reading way to much into the texts) but there was an interesting point that was brought up. We credit the ancient people with setting the ground work for modern civilization, but deny any place in our own cosmology for their belief in non-scientific ways of knowing. Having a background in anthropology, archaeology, and history it still suprises me how often we assume that our knowledge is greater than those people who came before us. I read an article in the NY times a year ago about how a pattern on a mosque used mathematics so advanced that our scholars only figured it out a few years ago.

The people in the past were not any less smart then we are now, but working with different information and with a different lens for sifting through the information that they had.

This ties into a problem I have with a lot of adults, and treating kids like they are stupid. I remember offering up ideas as a child and getting derided solely on the basis of my youth. No I am not saying that my ideas were great, or even right, but if they weren't right it was most likely because I lacked sufficient information to come to a "correct" conclusion. Now that I am an adult I get all sorts of people to listen to me, but my thought process hasn't changed much if at all from when I was younger.

I guess that the point of this is that maybe the ancients (or kids) have a lot more to offer then we really give them credit for. Being adults we are indoctrinated by culture and educational disciplines to see things in a certain way and ignore other potentially valid information. Maybe if we take a step away from what is "appropriate" we will better understand our world.